A recent study published by the Annals of the American Thoracic Society has revealed that patients suffering from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease doing moderate to vigourous exercises or physical activities showed lowered rates of 30 days readmission in hospitals in comparison to inactive once.

6,042 Kaiser Permanente patients’ records were examined to get this data. Kaiser Permanente requires the patients to provide details regarding the physical activity to be recorded during regular clinical visits. As per the Research Head, these records were taken and segregated into 3 groups; active, insufficiently active and inactive. Those suffering from COPD and moderately exercised for 3 to 4 times a week or 150 min a week showed 34% lower readmission rate. The 2nd category, insufficiently active recorded 33% lower risk of readmission within 30 days in comparison to the inactive.

Huong Nguyen, the head of this project and RN of the Department of Research and Evaluation in Kaiser Permanente stated that, this study has revealed groundbreaking information without conducting surveys or trials. Earlier, the information was used to find the relationship between physical activity and mortality rates, he said. He added that this was the 1st time the relationship between the 30 day readmission of COPD patients with physical activity was analysed.

Further, he added that the study group consisted of people of different ethnic origin, with commonality being people over 40 years of age suffering from COPD. Findings of this study suggest that physical activity could actually reduce hospitalisation and hence more focus will be given to improve the physical activities of patients having COPD.

In a separate study conducted by the American Thoracic Society and the European Respiratory Society revealed that exercising or training showed improvement in the quality of life of patients. Dr Nguyen informed that Kaiser Permanente being the 1st health care organisation to electronically record physical activity of patients systematically was able to provide suitable treatments based on the lifestyle of the patients.